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(But) look at these sexagenarian dogs! Their dog-teeth get sharper at every moment. The hairs drop from the fur of an old dog; (but) see these old (human) dogs clad in satin! See how their passionate desire and greed for women and gold, like the progeny of dogs, is increasing continually! Such a life as this, which is Hell’s stock-in-trade, is a shambles for the butchers (executioners) of (the Divine) Wrath; (Yet) when people say to him, “May your life be long!” he is delighted and opens his mouth in laughter.
He thinks a curse like this is a benediction: he never uncloses his (inward) eye or raises his head once (from the slumber of heedlessness). If he had seen (even as much as) a hair’s tip of the future state, he would have said to him (who wished him long life), “May thy life be like this!”
–Rumi, The Mathnawi, Book VI, circa 1270 A.D.

The cartoons at the link below should be required viewing (and understanding!) in school, especially any history or economics class. These cartoons are all from 100 years ago or more. They clearly describe the cementing into law–pending at the time– of the rigged banking, currency, and stock markets that financially enslave almost everyone on the planet to the endless hunger for humongo-profits of the few. They show that at least a some people understood the game then. Sadly, few understand the game even now. How do we get this understanding to everyone so that we can end this vicious travesty? How do we bring in the logic and compassion that clearly show the primitive and self-defeating nature of systematically-enshrined greed? Continue reading →

Yet another instance of the accelerating flood cycle: a photo from the devastating Himalayan floods, indicating a stance people might wish to take during these times:

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Despite being surrounded by the cyclic nature of physical life (breathing, heartbeat, blinking, day/night, tides, seasons, birth/death … and the less visible or invisible: sound waves, radio waves, x-rays, microwave cooking, evolution … and for a fun contemplation of large astronomical cycles, see this and this), for the most part, people tend to ignore cyclicality in favor of seeing life as a straight-line progression. This is unfortunate for at least two reasons: first, because all form is cyclic—form emerges, flourishes to some extent, and dissolves; second, because there are some not-so-obvious cycles that offer understanding for what is otherwise quite mysterious. In fact, here at Thundering Heard, we are on a path to discuss the biggest cycle of them all for people, a cycle that, once grasped, contains the answers to “little” questions like the meaning of life, why are we here, and so forth. But first, let’s get more adept at seeing the cyclic aspect of life and how important it is.

The Sunspot Cycle

There is a peak of sunspot activity every 10 to 13 years, with 11 years being the average for each cycle. A chart of the peaks and troughs of sunspot activity from 1926 to 2009 looks like this:

Let’s look at the three peaks labeled A, B, and C.

The peaks of sunspot activity often really “rev people up” financially, that is, there is typically an excitation of human activity that leads to a financial market bubble that coincides with the sunspot peak.

Three peaks ago, the peak in 1980, labeled A above, coincided with the peak of the commodity price boom and price inflation that took place in the 1970s after Nixon defaulted on the US promise, made near the end of World War 2, to always support conversion of Dollars into gold. Those were the days when the so-called Misery Index (inflation plus the unemployment rate) was tracked in daily newspapers, and mortgage rates in the US rose to 18%.

Here’s a closer look at the last two peaks of sunspot cycle activity:

The cycle peak labeled B was in 1990 and corresponded with the peak in Japan of bubbles in their stock and real estate markets. This was the time when it was generally held that Japan Inc. would rule the world, or at least own it; that its economy would soon be the largest in the world. A single block of downtown Tokyo real estate was said to be worth more than all of the real estate in California. Now that’s a bubble! (We’ll see in our next post on cycles why that Japan bubble grew so large when we cover another cycle that also contributed to this Japan peak. When multiple important cycles converge, the results can be gargantuan.) Following that peak, Japan experienced what has come to be called The Lost Decade, though it has now run for two decades. Both their stock and real estate markets lost 75% of their “value” after that peak, and they still have not come anywhere close to recovering their former glory as Japan has been mired in nearly constant recession ever since.

The sunspot peak labeled C aligned with the peak in the internet/technology stocks in the Spring and Summer of 2000, another famous bubble. Again money flowed, this time into Pets.com, Webvan,com, Geocities,com, DrKoop.com, and many others, most of which had little going for them except an idea and a web site. Little or no sales, no profits—who cared! They were going to the moon. It was a New Paradigm. If you thought it was insane, you “just didn’t get it.” And the thing is, that craziness for internet stocks had been in play for a few years; that hoopla could have ended in 1998 or 1999. But it didn’t. It ended when the sunspot cycle peaked in 2000.

Looking back, it would have been great for the participants in those bubbles to be aware of the sunspot cycle peak. They could have sidestepped a lot of trouble. So what’s going to happen this time around? Well, for a few years, I have thought that this economic cycle might hang on into the peak of the current sunspot cycle, called Solar Cycle 24, which was projected for August 2013. But Amon Ra may have thrown us a curve ball. It looks like this cycle will not have the usual single large peak, but rather a dual peak like Solar Cycle 14 from the early 20th Century. According to solar physicist Dean Pesnell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center:

“This is solar maximum. But it looks different from what we expected because it is double peaked.” Pesnell noted similarities between the current cycle and Solar Cycle 14, which happened between February 1902 and August 1913 and experienced a double peak. If the two cycles are in fact twins, he said that “it would mean one peak in late 2013 and another in 2015.”

Here is a chart that shows the peak in 2000 plus our current cycle:

If the NASA guy is right, there should be a bubble peak in either 2013 or 2015. But a bubble in what? Here are some clues:

Lots of savings accounts pay only 0.01% in interest.

Mortgage rates got near 1% in Japan and 3% in the US. (Would you lend money to a stranger for 30 years for 3% interest? Neither would banks, which is why almost all mortgages need a guarantee from a government program or the banks won’t make the loan.)

Short-term interest rates in Germany and Switzerland recently went negative. That’s right, if you wanted to lend money to Germany or Switzerland on a short term basis, you had the pay them for the privilege.

If you think these phenomena don’t make a lot of sense, you are right. But it points to the culprit that has all the hallmarks of a monster bubble: the world government bond market. The bull market in bonds has been running for over 30 years. On May 2, if you wanted to lend money to Germany for 10 years, they would pay you an interest rate of 1.2%; the US, 1.6%. And if you wanted to lend Switzerland money for 10 years in December, they were paying a whopping 0.4%. Japan? 0.45%.

And in the case of Japan in particular, they are working very hard to devalue their currency, to make sure the yen falls in value. So the question is, who in their right mind would lend to these countries for such a pittance in interest, especially while most of them are printing money to intentionally debase the value of their currencies!?! You get a very poor interest rate and, if you get your capital back, it will be in a currency that will have fallen in value over 10 years. Yet, that is what institutions and people are doing. Recently, if you wanted to get a reasonable interest rate on 10-year government bonds, then you would have lend money to the country of Rwanda; they paid 7% on a recent offering of 10 year bonds. Best of luck getting your capital back 10 years from now.

When this bubble bursts, the consequences will be huge. This is not a bubble in one country, like Japan in 1980, or in one sector of the economy, like tech stocks in 2000, we’re talking about government bonds, worldwide! This is the market that supports military spending, education, transportation, and just about every safety net (in the US: Social Security, Medicare, Food Stamps, Medicaid, Unemployment Insurance, and so forth) on the planet. And you get this paltry interest rate when you might not even get your capital back in 10 years. A number of governments are on a clear trajectory for bankruptcy; there is a good chance that bond buyers will not get their capital back! And yet they lend huge amounts of money to these governments. Especially Baby Boomers, they have been pouring money into bond funds. Just like they poured money into stocks in 2000, and real estate investments in 2006. Oh well.

When do I think the bond bubble will pop? This year! 2013. I don’t think it can last to 2015. In fact, the bubble pop may have already started. And guess which institutions count government bonds as their major “stable” capital: banks. Yet another reason to watch out for the banks!

Furthermore, the solar cycle might actually peak this year. The NASA guy might be wrong about the dual-peak forecast.

What will it mean if this bubble pops? It means interest rates will rise, possibly a lot. This will strongly increase the amount of interest governments must pay on their debts. Their deficits will skyrocket.

Mortgage interest rates are closely tied to the government bond market, so mortgage rates will rise as well. (US mortgage rates rose from 3.88% to 4.35% just over the last week!) And if government deficits skyrocket, programs will need to be cut, so the massive support they are currently providing for the mortgage market will be in jeopardy, threatening even further rate increases.

Still, two cycles that we will discuss in the next post about cycles argue for that 2015 date.

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I would like to make one thing very clear: If you woke up tomorrow and heard that a large “systemically important” international bank had collapsed, causing chaos in the rest of the financial system, and that most banks would be closed for some number of days, would you really be surprised? Probably not. Many people are starting to get the idea that the system is not exactly solid. I am certainly in that camp. So when I talk about August 2013 or some month in 2015 as the month when the real systemic collapse will commence, please know that, in my view, the more-than-sufficient conditions are in place for that full system collapse to happen at any minute. Discussions like the one above are an attempt to get a handle on probabilities. In terms of preparation, acceleration is not to be trifled with: I think that everyone should be doing what they can to be prepared now. If it turns out there is more time for preparation, fabulous, this type of preparation takes awhile and I’m sure we can all use the time. But that time may be short indeed. As the photo at the top of the post shows, when change arrives in your area, it may be monumental change.

At base, the world has a true financial system consisting of people producing goods and services with real value and trading those among themselves. But grafted onto that reality is an intentionally complex and confusing mega-structure built from a series of promises that are lies. As these promises are increasingly understood as lies, this mega-structure is proceeding inevitably down a path to disintegration. The primary purposes of this article are:

1. To provide you with a checklist so you can understand where we are in this process of financial system disintegration. There is a caveat in terms of using this as a serial checklist proceeding over time: more than one of these lies may get generally recognized in a single event, with understanding rapidly communicated to the entire world.

2. To forearm those who wish to prepare with an understanding of what is unfolding. This is a predictable process, but it may feel quite chaotic to the unprepared. With understanding, and with echoes from the words of the immortal Rudyard Kipling, you will be able to keep your head (and your heart!) when all about you may be losing theirs.

3. To encourage people to take simple steps to sidestep the consequences of the widespread recognition of these lies. It is important to understand that general recognition of just one of these foundational lies–the lie that real estate prices always go up–came within hours, in October 2008, of vaporizing almost all of what are considered to be assets in this financial regime. Evasive action needs to be taken before these lies are generally understood. It is better to do your run on the bank before everyone else decides that’s a good idea. Those who prepare will be able to provide some assistance to those who have not.

4. To allow readers to proceed from understanding, not from the fear that leads to panic, and not from the fear that leads to denial or to throwing up one’s hands and pretending there is nothing to be done about all this. We hope this article provides such understanding.

In terms of tracking this process, we have already seen one prominent lie from this system bite the dust:

Lie #1: Real estate always goes up.

The perpetrators of this lie trotted out pithy sayings about population always increasing and “they aren’t making any more land” to somehow prove that real estate prices always go up. People can’t be blamed for this erroneous belief. Many saw real estate prices rising for their entire lifetime. But if one takes a larger historical look, it is obvious that real estate prices obey the Law of Cycles. They rise and fall just like most prices. This cyclical behavior of prices would not have been a problem for most people except so many of them fell for the idea that they should buy one or more properties with borrowed money, with a mortgage. So when prices fell, the amount owed on the mortgage has turned out to be greater than the current value of the house. Which is a nasty problem because, if a person wants to sell such a house, the current sale price is less than what they owe, so they have to pay money to sell their house, money which many don’t have. So they lose their house in a short sale or foreclosure.

For those who now have the urge to bet that real estate prices have fallen enough, the evidence says it’s a bad bet if you are thinking you will get price appreciation. If you are buying with cash to navigate through tough times, that is, you are buying a place where you can grow your own food, produce your own electricity, pump your own pure water, cut wood to heat your house? Good idea, depending, of course, on price and location. But buying or holding real estate thinking that the price will rise? Bad idea. There’s lots of evidence that any miniature “bottom” in prices will be short-lived and that prices will fall for a generation. The main reason? Real estate prices are still floating on a sea of debt. Most governments are still propping up otherwise-dead mortgage markets with government loans and guarantees that only a fool, excuse me, a government, would make. In other words, these are uneconomic loans that no sane person would make, and these insane loans are still propping up real estate prices in a big way. It won’t last.

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The remaining lies are in various states of disarray, but all still play key roles in the mindset that keeps the system intact.

Lie #2: It’s best to use Other People’s Money.

The farther in time we progressed following the 1930’s—the last time there were worldwide losses of homes, farms, and business to foreclosure, the last time governments defaulted on their bonds en masse, the last time there were huge numbers of bank failures—the more people were convinced that saving up money in order to buy something was for morons, and that buying things now, on credit, was the smart thing to do. The big deal became just how much borrowing one could “qualify for.” (This disease still persists for some, which is why, despite all of the pain it has inflicted, Lie #2 has not been relegated to the past in this article.) Paying it back was simple: money was worth less and less over time, everyone knew that; salaries always rose; the price of houses, the main collateral for loans, those always went up.

The result of this mindset is that so many people and organizations and even countries have become debt slaves to the bankers. To quote an anti-debt crusader in
Ireland: “Bankers want you to use your energy and your work to make their dreams come true.” Too bad more people didn’t know that before getting themselves so far into debt that it dominates their life.

Lie #3: We can buy cheap goods from countries that have cheap labor, and yet keep our much-higher salaries and benefits.

We’ve all heard for decades about how manufacturing, and in more recent years services, are moving from the developed world to the emerging markets. People in developed countries love to buy cheap goods from lands with ultra-low labor costs. But they expect their own salaries and benefits to remain the same or even increase. How can that be when the sources of income–that is, the jobs and profits and the tax base–that support that salary and benefits structure have moved to another part of the planet? This divergence between expected lifestyles and the labor required to support those lifestyles is bringing exponentially increasing strain to the developed countries. People and governments have tried to maintain their lifestyle illusions by borrowing more money than they can ever repay. They have used this borrowed money to try to bridge the gap between falling real income levels and their habitual spending. Much of the borrowed funds are coming from the countries currently doing all the work to produce those cheap goods. The signs that this attempt is coming apart at the seams are everywhere for those who choose to look.

Lie #4: Government pension and medical programs will deliver on their promises.

Many currently depend on government pension, medical insurance, and disability programs. Many more consider them an essential ingredient in their upcoming retirement plans. But as discussed in Lie #3, the tax base that supports these programs is rapidly eroding, and their funding assumptions were based on far shorter lifespans, lower medical costs, and flawed demographics in terms of the shrinking number of people paying into the system versus the growing number receiving benefits. And governments forcing interest rates to near zero in lame attempts to boost their economies means that pension fund assets earn far less in interest payments than expected. (This is a serious problem for private pension plans as well, most of whom still claim they can earn 8% on their assets a year on average, something very few are able to consistently accomplish. Without that level of earnings, they will not be able to meet their commitments.) If the liabilities of governments were calculated the way they are for businesses, the governments would be promptly declared bankrupt and hauled into court, where evidence of fraud would be a dominant topic.

Governments have four options regarding this slow motion train wreck:

cut promised benefits;

radically increase tax revenue;

borrow even more money;

print new money. (In the typical fashion of these times, they came up with a new name for this counterfeiting process of printing new money, they call it “quantitative easing.”)

Because the last two options on that list are the most politically palatable and the least painful to current voters, these are the options strongly preferred by politicians. They believe that telling the truth about this situation and taking responsible measures to put these programs on a sound footing would get them promptly kicked out of office, which is likely correct. So they take the borrowing and printing route because the pain from these is hidden from most people, and most of the pain is dumped on people’s children and grandchildren. Oddly, for all the noise people make about wanting to leave great things to their children, most people don’t care a whit about passing this huge government borrowing burden onto the children and grandchildren about whom they claim to care so much.

The problem with the borrowing and printing regime is that markets and people are increasingly catching on that: the borrowings are too large to be repaid; and the printing debases the money people have saved and earn, driving up the prices of necessities. Countries such as Greece, to whom the markets will no longer lend money and which cannot independently print money because of membership in the Eurozone, have already cut retiree pensions by two-thirds, and there are more cuts to come.

And while federal government programs have so far garnered most of the attention in terms of their unsustainability, most state, province, and city pension and insurance programs are no better off, and many are worse off, and they generally don’t have the option to print money. In the US, the Pew Research Center and others have estimated that state and local pension programs are underfunded by more than a trillion dollars. Yes, a trillion dollars is one of those numbers that is too large to comprehend. But the takeaway for anyone depending on these programs is that you will not receive the benefits you expect. And yes, when the bankers need a bailout or the governments want to fight yet another war, then it’s deficits be damned, they can easily come up with a trillion dollars. But when it comes to helping regular people, then it’s: “Sorry, we’d love to help you, but we can’t afford it, we have these deficits, you know, so we can’t help you.”

Lie #5: Your money is in the bank

The banking cartel loves to make you feel like they are rock solid and that the money you deposit with them is “in the bank,” safe and sound. As most actually do know, it isn’t. Or rather, only a small portion of it is actually “in the bank.” The rest, generally 90% to 95% of it or more, gets loaned out. (Or is used by the bank for speculative trading.) The bank pays you, at best, a paltry amount of interest on your deposit, and utilizes your money for something that pays them at a higher rate, and thus makes money from your money. And in many countries, governments assure us that banks are a truly rock solid place for your money by saying that, if the bank really messes things up and loses your money, the government guarantees that you will get it back.

This works quite well—until it doesn’t. This model of banking, the “fractional reserve” system, where only a fraction of the deposits are kept on hand, depends on the idea that not all depositors will want their cash at the same time, so most of the deposits can be loaned out. This is fine until a group of depositors needs that money, or they get frightened that perhaps the bank won’t have their deposit available for them when they want it, and they start a “run on the bank.” We’ve all seen pictures of what that looks like. Some of them show a well-behaved line of people waiting to get their funds. Other pictures show an angry, unruly mob clustered at the front door, perhaps bashing some bank windows. And if the bank has loaned out 95% or more of their deposits, it doesn’t take a large group of depositors to drain all the cash from the bank.

When this happens at a single bank, no problem. The government steps in with its guarantees and depositors are made whole up to the level of what the government guarantees. But in the Fall of 2008, we saw the start of a run on the banking system. Seeing the collapse of some banks and hearing rumors of many more, some people and corporations worried that the entire banking system was going kaput (it was!), and they started withdrawing all they could from the system. So governments quickly stepped in with far larger guarantee programs than had ever existed before, covering types of deposits, such as those in money market funds, that had never been guaranteed before. It was made clear that money would be printed to cover deposits, and so depositors calmed down and stopped their run on the system.

So the problem was solved, for the time being, by governments guaranteeing that the failure of private, commercial, corporate banks would not hurt their depositors. But now, those who astutely foresaw that the 2007-2009 phase of the crisis was coming, and warned about it loudly and clearly before it happened, see that people are rightly suspicious of government guarantees because it is becoming obvious that governments are broke. And who wants to rely on a guarantee from a bankrupt entity! More on this topic below at Lie #8.

The real problem for the banks is that they own what are called toxic assets. When the banks were perceived to be failing, it was because people knew that what the banks were counting as “capital” was losing value hand over fist and that, in fact, many banks, especially the big ones, actually had no capital left at all. Because of the political power of the big banks, governments attempted to solve this problem in three ways:

1) They let financial institutions lie about the value of their assets. They came up with accounting tricks that enable a bank to say that a loan portfolio is worth 100% of what they paid for it even if the collateral backing the loans, for example houses or shopping malls, is now worth far less than 100%. People call this the “extend and pretend” model. It is not a real solution, but it temporarily covers up the problem.
2) They buy toxic assets from the banks at full value and transfer the toxicity to the government. For example, the US Federal Reserve purchased $1.2 trillion worth of mortgage backed securities to take the losses away from the banks and to put taxpayers on the hook for the loss. People call this the “privatization of profits and the socialization of losses” model.
3) They lend them scads of short term cash to keep them afloat. Most banks in Spain would now be closed without the accounting lies from point 1 above and from hundreds of billions of euros worth of short term loans of newly-printed money from the ECB, the European Central Bank.

And in Greece and Spain, for example, some depositors are wising up. Billions of euros of deposits are being drained from Greek and Spanish banks each month, making bank solvency an even more distant hope with each passing month.

Lie #6: Your money is in your brokerage account.

Most people used to think–many still do–that brokerage accounts were safe from the fractional reserve threat to bank accounts, that is, they believed that brokerages did not lend out their money the way banks do, that their deposits to brokerage accounts just sat there waiting for deployment or withdrawal. Ha! Now that we are all wising up, how could we have thought that Wall Streeters could keep their grubby hands off that large pool of money. What the brokerages do is called the hypothecation of these assets, that is, they loan them out for a profit. And the entity, and I use that word intentionally, to whom they loan these assets often re-hypothecates them, that is, they loan those assets to yet another entity. It turns out that the City of London, an entity that operates quite independently of UK law in several respects, is the world playground of re-hypothecation, where the same asset can be re-lent several times. Have you wondered why it’s been so difficult for regulators to determine where the client money is in the recent failure of Jon Corzine’s MF Global brokerage? Look no further than the world of re-hypothecation, in which it can be difficult for anyone to know “where the money is” at any point in time.

So this is another part of the system where everything works well until it doesn’t. If people, intelligently I might add, start withdrawing significant amounts of money from the brokerage industry, they will find that it is yet another fractional reserve environment. So, is your money in your brokerage account really there? Maybe. Remember all that fine print they sent you when you opened your account that you didn’t read? Maybe that part about your account being a “Sweep Account”? Are the Wall Streeters sweeping your money for their profit?

Lie #7: It is OK for financial institutions to use huge leverage.

The Powers That Be/Were who run the financial regime think it is OK for central banks, commercial and investment banks, brokerages, and hedge funds to operate using massive leverage, in other words, massive borrowed funding. The system allows the likes of the Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Deutsche Bank to borrow tremendous amounts of money. In normal times, these big banks are considered reliable borrowers; when times are difficult, they are presumed to be backstopped by their governments.

The huge banks routinely operate at 20 to1 to 50 to 1 leverage. 50:1 leverage means that, for every $2 of reliable capital they have, they can operate in the marketplace as if they have $100. So a 2.5% loss wipes them out, makes them insolvent. In world markets operating at ever-increasing speeds, how can any participant always avoid a 2% loss? They can’t. Thus the financial system goes from crisis to crisis. As long as such large-scale leverage persists, the next bubble, and therefore the next crisis, will never be far off. Big leverage was at the base of every major crisis of the modern financial era: the Crash of 1987, the LTCM debacle of 1998, the tech stock crash of 2000, and the real estate bubble.

So why is this allowed to persist? Because these influential institutions can make a lot of money using leverage when times are good. Money they can use to influence the political and regulatory process. And when times are bad? Their losses are taken over by the taxpayers. Heads they win; tails we lose.

And consider what happened, and continues to happen, in the real estate market, when a buyer only has to come up with a 2% down payment. That means they are operating at a leverage ratio of 50:1. This has worked out very poorly for buyers and lenders. Yet in the USA, the government agency known as the FHA still guarantees hundreds of billions of dollars worth of real estate loans each year where the buyer only needs to come up with 3.5% as a down payment.

Lie #8: The government guarantees it.

Governments love to guarantee things. It makes people feel good, thus helping to secure votes, and typically it costs nothing up front. It’s a politician’s dream. So governments guarantee all kinds of things: bank deposits, mortgages, private pensions, student loans, loans to build what no sane person would build such as nuclear power plants, the bonds for infrastructure projects, loans made by a zillion government agencies, zombie banks (ones that would be promptly out of business if they weren’t being propped up by the government), companies considered too important to be allowed to fail, export-import loans, mortgage-backed securities…the list is long. And we have seen it expand promptly when an emergency hits.

But now people are questioning these guarantees. Iceland actually allowed citizens to vote on some of their government guarantees when the payments actually came due…and the people promptly threw those guarantees out. Guarantees in Ireland are on very thin ice. Very few trust government guarantees in Greece. Portugal, Spain, and Italy are likely next on the docket. In the past, very few people calculated these guarantees as part of government debt because they assumed that a guarantee was sufficient, that because of the guarantee, no money would ever have to actually be paid out. Now some of these guarantees are taking a big bite from government budgets. In the US, billions are being paid quarterly from government coffers into mortgage monsters Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to cover losses on guaranteed mortgages.

Note that the public questioning of guarantees is mostly now happening in Europe because the individual countries in question do not have the authority to print new Euros. But the fact is that finances in Japan, the US, and the UK are worse than those in some European countries, but because these countries can print money at will, which they are also doing in volume, people still “trust” their guarantees. It is worth considering whether such trust is well-placed when printing trillions is required to keep the guarantees intact. People and markets will ultimately decide that it is not. It is best to stay ahead of this curve and to understand whether your bank, your pension fund, or any institution on which you rely is on a sustainable path. If it is not, make other plans as well as you can. And take action soon.